When we brought Luminous Touch to Salzburg, we had one working jacket, a proof of concept, and a long list of things we knew we had to rebuild. Four weeks later, we left with a finished system.
What is Luminous Touch?
Luminous Touch is a wearable instrument for exploring human touch. Two suits, covered in joysticks, LEDs, and vibration motors, translate every touch into light, sound, and vibration — felt by the person wearing the suit, seen by everyone in the room. The body becomes a controller; touch becomes something you can watch, hear, and share.
Performers and audiences use the suits to play with closeness: every contact is amplified, made visible, passed on. What is usually private — the moment one person touches another — becomes a shared sensory experience, raising questions about intimacy, boundaries, and how we communicate without words.
During the subnetAIR residency — hosted by subnet and the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Salzburg — we completed the second suit, revised the hardware from the ground up, and rebuilt the technical implementation entirely. The biggest shift happened in the software: the suits can now talk to each other, and to any device in the room that controls light or sound. What began as a single interactive garment has become a networked instrument — touch on one body can ripple through the other suit, the lighting rig, the sound system, the entire space.
Designed, engineered, and built by us — every layer of it
Everything in Luminous Touch comes from our own hands: the garments and their patterns, the circuit boards, the 3D-printed parts, the firmware, the software that connects it all. There is no off-the-shelf system underneath — we design the hardware, write the code, and sew the suits ourselves.
This is not a detail. Because we control every layer, we could rebuild the entire technical implementation during the residency — new hardware, new software, a new communication protocol without waiting for anyone or anything. When the suits needed to learn a new language, we taught them ourselves.
We closed the residency with a public showing, testing the new system with a live audience. The HCI Center supported us throughout with people, creative input, and space to experiment — the kind of room to fail and iterate that a project like this needs.
Both suits are now ready for real-world performance. This is where the next chapter begins.